Mosul: the centre of two great crises

The most senior British officer involved in planning for post war Iraq, licensed lay reader in the Church of England, Major General Sir Tim Cross told us all on ‘Today’ (BBC Radio 4, 11 June) that he thought ‘they’ (presumably he and his pals) had underestimated the depth of the divisions between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, indeed, in the whole of the middle East. Referring to the break up of Iraq and the Syrian civil war, it could all go on for another ten years he sadly suggested.

This particular specimen of the British military perhaps did not realise that in large part that was how the brits and their empire set up the Middle East in the first place – by fomenting these and other useful divisions.  Like Pakistan and India, the modern map of the world owes a great deal to that particular legacy.

But perhaps not surprisingly General Tim misses the point. The move by ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is also known as ISIL, seizing Mosul and dissolving the Iraqi army, together with their previous capture of Ramadi and Falluja, is a major shift in Middle East and world politics. It is nothing less than a signal of the break up of unchallenged western over-lordship in the Middle East. It is also another, decisive door closing on the ‘Arab Spring.’

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar etc., were always nothing other than puppets of the US and remain so. Egypt’s military dictatorship is in new and positive negotiations with the Pentagon about its own status. Israel, because of its endless war with the Palestinians (the traditional, radical enemy of the west) remains the favored regional policeman. The Iranians overthrew both the British and the US empires – but the two progressive forces that might have united the Arab / Palestinian / Iranian cause, socialism and a united Arab/Middle East Federation – based on Arab nationalism - have both been seen to fail. The second Iranian revolution defeated the US but it also opened the door for the current reactionary utopianism and the fantasy unity of the Caliphate.  However, unlike the Arab Spring, many can see Muslim radicalism, at least in the sense of its success in resisting imperialism, to be a realistic template for an independent society. (Although western style capitalist ‘reality’ is already re-growing inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.)

Imperialism (the US and its assorted hangers on) feel the ground shifting from under their feet, after defeat for their new puppet regimes in Iraq and in Afghanistan, despite years of war and trillions of dollars. The tectonic plates are now shifting in the Middle East (and in India and Pakistan.) All that blood and money – for what? The US’s influence and control is weaker than it has ever been.

Here we come to the remorseless logic of the permanent revolution. This grand political insight of the early twentieth century is mostly identified with Trotsky and exemplified in Lenin’s April Theses, the strategic document that led to the successful second Russian revolution. In the case of the new brush fires of revolt, aimed against western influence, across Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Libya, they emerge from the failure of indigenous capitalism to consolidate its independence and a new life for its people. Despite the Arab Spring and its echoes in Iran, the city based classes that capitalism spawned, could not begin to consolidate the re-founding of their societies and the country as a whole in social, economic and political terms, and therefore were unable able to lead the whole nation to its real freedom. The absence of this social and political leadership did not make Imperialist efforts any more successful – given their hopeless wars - instead this lacunae created a different leadership, a different sort of popular mobilisation, inevitably carrying echoes of the old slogans (e.g. for a United Arab federation) and using a distant, reactionary (and fantastical) past as its only available route map to true and free independence.

Mosul expresses both the weakness of Imperialism in the Middle East and beyond, as well as the weakness of the working and other urban classes and socialist politics and its place in these modern struggles in the Middle East. The world’s two great social classes in the world appear empty of any perspective in the current shifts across the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan/India. The cracks in western capitalism continue and so the explosive social and political oppressions that it has contained will vent. In the west we must do what we can to keep our war mongers away from any more of the disasters they have already created. There has to be the maximum space for the people in revolt in the Middle East to find their own way to the answers of the questions they face.